And another poem from 1993:  A 25-year Reunion Directory, when the catering groups for reunions were only starting up,  was mailed over three months after the event...

A SERIES OF EVENTS IN JANUARY 1993

 

The arrival of the reunion directory

was supposed to culminate a series of four events.

I bought wool on sale

and sewed an A-line skirt,

gray plaid with a line of brown.

I biked in my black jeans for the Sunday

smelter smokestack demolition.

 

I stood two hours in cold on Sunday

in a clear view on a lot with many others,

until they set off charges in the stack

and a puff crawled up the base

and it began to tip, then collapsed

all in a shimmer, down, and that

was how it vanished.  Then I pedaled back.

 

I wore the skirt on Monday for the march

when they changed the name of K-Street

to Martin Luther King, Jr. Way.  It means

the area is African-American, now,

despite the Valhalla Temple.  Strange,

yet not at all, to walk below the temple

windows behind some Indians.

 

My mother would not have winked an eye.

And would have played piano,

my father filled prescriptions

where it is now Browne's Star Grill.

 

When the storm woke me

on Inauguration Day

I dressed in the skirt and a pink sweater.

In the cold and dark of the wind

a panel of fresh tar paper

blew off the roof past my window,

but my radio batteries were good.

 

Later, when I phoned about the directory, 

they explained rather riskily, already

over three months, they had been

out of power, like so many all weekend long.

This poem from 1993...

UNIVERSAL GRIND   October 21, 1993

 

Can opener wedged into

slit and slit only a dent

across the several gallon firmament.

 

Folger's Universal Grind

holds the larger plant up

to the kitchen light,

 

the Eastern Magician

carries the stars in a row.

But the sense within it

 

of the useless opener

thwarted and outsmarted

tinctures the idea of it.

 

Deaths falls out of the glass

like snow -  it fell and fell,

that box of candles

 

all the listed glass unwraps

tissue papers, all are crowds

of tears all balled

 

tear-filled hankies

on the floor.  Ice crackles

in the glass,  ice water

 

down again on the mat.

I want my pieces I've salvaged.

I dreamed last night

 

that a man carried off

my revere ware pots, I cried

those belonged to my mother.

 

And after it all, all pieces,

the sorrow chases me

without a brain, undoes

 

my strenuous agony,

the ministry, from its carport,

cries for charity.

 

My mind walks

to the cemetery again

to clear a leaf off our name.

Revision - Slideshow Audio

A day or two after I posted Vart skall jag köra hästar och vagn?   I revised.  Information had appeared on Facebook that pointed out changes necessary to improve the translation.  Also, I had seen the gap - between the two times the song was played - was too wide.  I had seen I wanted to enlarge the crops from the photo.  So I made a new copy from the song recording and made new slides with the improved translation.  So far I like the new version.